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Page 28
We have not even the right to say that this process of selection from
reality means that we keep the beautiful elements of it and simply omit
and eliminate the ugly ones. This again is not in the least
characteristic of art, however often the popular mind may couple this
superficial idea with that other one, that art consists of imitation. It
is not true that the esthetic value depends upon the beauty of the
selected material. The men and women whom Rembrandt painted were not
beautiful persons. The ugliest woman may be the subject of a most
beautiful painting. The so-called beautiful landscape may, of course, be
material for a beautiful landscape painting, but the chances are great
that such a pretty vista will attract the dilettante and not the real
artist who knows that the true value of his painting is independent of
the prettiness of the model. He knows that a muddy country road or a
dirty city street or a trivial little pond may be the material for
immortal pictures. He who writes literature does not select scenes of
life which are beautiful in themselves, scenes which we would have liked
to live through, full of radiant happiness and joy; he does not
eliminate from his picture of life that which is disturbing to the peace
of the soul, repellant and ugly and immoral. On the contrary, all the
great works of literature have shown us dark shades of life beside the
light ones. They have spoken of unhappiness and pain as often as of joy.
We have suffered with our poets, and in so far as the musical composer
expresses the emotions of life the great symphonies have been full of
pathos and tragedy. True art has always been selection, but never
selection of the beautiful elements in outer reality.
But if the esthetic value is independent of the imitative approach to
reality and independent of the elimination of unpleasant elements or of
the collection and addition of pleasant traits, what does the artist
really select and combine in his creation? How does he shape the world?
How does nature look when it has been remolded by the artistic
temperament and imagination? What is left of the real landscape when the
engraver's needle has sketched it? What is left of the tragic events in
real life when the lyric poet has reshaped them in a few rhymed stanzas?
Perhaps we may bring the characteristic features of the process most
easily to recognition if we contrast them with another kind of reshaping
process. The same landscape which the artist sketches, the same historic
event which the lyric poet interprets in his verses, may be grasped by
the human mind in a wholly different way. We need only think of the
scientific work of the scholar. He too may have the greatest interest in
the landscape which the engraver has rendered: the tree on the edge of
the rock, torn by the storm, and at the foot of the cliff the sea with
its whitecapped waves. He too is absorbed by the tragic death of a
Lincoln. But what is the scholar's attitude? Is it his aim to reproduce
the landscape or the historic event? Certainly not. The meaning of
science and scholarship and of knowledge in general would be completely
misunderstood if their aim were thought to be simply the repeating of
the special facts in reality. The scientist tries to explain the facts,
and even his description is meant to serve his explanation. He turns to
that tree on the cliff with the interest of studying its anatomical
structure. He examines with a microscope the cells of those tissues in
the branches and leaves in order that he may explain the growth of the
tree and its development from the germ. The storm which whips its
branches is to him a physical process for which he seeks the causes, far
removed. The sea is to him a substance which he resolves in his
laboratory into its chemical elements and which he explains by tracing
the geological changes on the surface of the earth.
In short, the scientist is not interested in that particular object
only, but in its connections with the total universe. He explains the
event by a reference to general laws which are effective everywhere.
Every single growth and movement is linked by him with the endless chain
of causes and effects. He surely reshapes the experience in connecting
every single impression with the totality of events, in finding the
general in the particular, in transforming the given facts into the
scientific scheme of an atomistic universe. It is not different from the
historical event. To the scholarly historian the death of Lincoln is
meaningless if it is not seen in its relation to and connection with the
whole history of the Civil War and if this again is not understood as
the result of the total development of the United States. And who can
understand the growth of the United States, unless the whole of modern
history is seen as a background and unless the ideas of state philosophy
which have built up the American democracy are grasped in their
connection with the whole story of European political thought in
preceding centuries? The scholar may turn to natural or to social
events, to waves or trees or men: every process and action in the world
gains interest for him only by being connected with other things and
events. Every point which he marks is the nodal point for numberless
relations. To grasp a fact in the sense of scholarly knowledge means to
see it in all its connections, and the work of the scholar is not simply
to hold the fact as he becomes aware of it but to trace the connections
and to supplement them by his thought until a completed system of
interrelated facts in science or in history is established.
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